The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
The development and deployment of internet of things (IoT) devices has proceeded with remarkable speed in the past several years. IoT devices are diverse, including everything from controllers of industrial equipment to smart watches and personal activity monitors. However, security infrastructure has not kept pace with the huge number and wide use of these devices. Some analysts estimate that billions of such devices will be operating and connected to internetworks within a few years, but there is presently no effective security architecture that can efficiently permit IoT devices to be secured, yet readily usable. Key constraints in this technical field have included limited processing power, limited memory, and limited or absent user interface elements. All these characteristics of IoT devices make them difficult to integrate into existing client-server security systems. At the same time, misuse of IoT devices could be catastrophic by permitting an attacker or unauthorized user to gain control of industrial equipment or other systems that have embedded IoT devices.
In some security approaches a root certificate authority (CA) issues digital certificates to one or more certificate authorities, which are then authorized to issue other certificates to individual computing devices. This traditional approach requires that the various computing devices have access to the internet for requesting certificates directly from a CA. This centralized approach creates difficulties for decentralized deployment of IoT devices, where network connectivity is often not reliable enough to obtain signed certificates at the time of device registration. Decentralized approaches also face difficulties with data security while synchronizing sensitive information across multiple CA devices.
Thus, there is a need for decentralized certificate authority that securely enables enrollment and revocation of devices even in the absence of uninterrupted internet connectivity.